Customers & Loyalty

Because orders from every channel land in one place, so do the people who placed them. Customers, reviews, coupons and gift cards are all first-class records rather than a bolt-on.

Customers

Customers lists everyone who has ordered or booked. A customer record holds contact details, marketing preferences and their history with you.

Clicking a row opens a customer detail overview — order history, reservations, total spend and recent activity — rather than dropping into an edit form. It is the screen to open when someone rings up about a previous order.

The customers list with search, contact details and order counts

Customers are created automatically as orders and bookings come in, and can also be added by hand for account customers and regulars.

Reviews

Reviews are collected from the storefront and moderated in Reviews. Publish the ones you want shown, and they appear on the public reviews page (a Joomla menu item of type Next Restaurant → Reviews).

Moderation is the whole point: reviews are unpublished until someone approves them, so the public page is never a surprise.

Coupons

Create coupons under Promotions → Coupons. A coupon carries:

Setting	Effect
Code	What the guest types at checkout
Discount	A fixed amount or a percentage
Validity dates	When the code works
Usage limits	Total redemptions, and per customer
Minimum spend	The threshold below which it is refused
Status	Unpublish to withdraw a code without deleting its history

Codes are validated server-side at checkout against every one of those rules. A code that has expired, been used up, or doesn't meet the minimum is refused with a reason — not silently applied.

Redemptions are recorded, so a campaign's actual take-up is a number rather than an impression.

Gift cards

Gift cards are sold on the storefront (a Joomla menu item of type Next Restaurant → Gift Card) and redeemed at the point of sale.

Purchase. A guest buys a card for a value; it is issued with its own code.
Redemption. The card is used as a payment method at the POS or at checkout, drawing down its balance.
Partial use. A card larger than the check leaves a remaining balance for next time.
Management. Promotions → Gift Cards lists issued cards with their balances and status.

Redemption is not available in 6.0.0. Gift cards can be sold, issued and managed, and their balances are tracked — but the Gift card payment provider is locked (Coming soon), because nothing yet validates a balance at the point of payment. The same applies to redeeming Loyalty points against a check. Both unlock in a future update; balances accrued in the meantime are kept and will be redeemable then.

Gift cards are a payment provider in the registry, so once redemption ships it will settle the check through the same pipeline as any other payment and appear in the ledger. See Payments.

The gift cards list showing issued cards with their codes, original values, remaining balances and status

Turning it off

Customers and reviews belong to the customers module; coupons and gift cards belong to loyalty. Both can be switched off independently under Apps — a venue that doesn't run promotions can remove the whole promotions area without affecting ordering.

Practical notes

Coupon rules are enforced on the server. Do not rely on hiding the field to control who can use a code; the rules on the coupon are what actually apply.
Gift-card balances are money. They settle checks, so treat issuing them with the same care as a till.
Reviews stay unpublished until approved. Nothing reaches the public page by default.